A Life in Research

 

Following my proposal, it was agreed by these European scientists for ICOD to become a European conference under a different name, to be held in different European countries in different years.  But it did not quite happen, because of a lack of unanimity and commitment of those European scientists who originally wanted it.

 However, after ICOD-2, I became well-known internationally as a database figure, but by then I already had established a database research community in the UK with many projects. My PRECI European Collaboration had taken roots, and my PRECI distributed database architecture had become well-known, followed by many other activities in the subsequent years, as described below.  I found myself mingling with the top database figures, my presence being sought even at the highest database committees such as the Steering Committee meetings of the VLDB conferences.  Some years later in Japan, I was strolling one evening with my wife on the main shopping street of Kyoto, when suddenly a Japanese couple came out of a restaurant in front of us. He immediately came towards me and extended his hand, saying: “Ah Prof Deen I am so pleased to meet you here. I know you are in Japan”. I immediately recognised him as a top Japanese database researcher whom I met in the VLDB-1986 conference. He explained that he had just celebrated his 10th wedding anniversary with his wife in that restaurant, and then he introduced his wife to us. I was relieved that my wife and I were wearing our normal clothes that evening, rather than our tattered holiday jeans. However, I thought my wife would be impressed by my recognisability –  not a bit of it, she was as cool as the Kamakura Buddha. 

 

BNCODS

 Given that an international conference is not possible in the UK every year, I created the series called the British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD), to be held annually in the UK on those years when there was no international conference. I ran it for the first five years, produced a constitution, created a steering committee and helped select a new chairman before I handed it over to the UK DB community in 1986. This annual series now provides the main forum for debate and discussion for the British DB community.  [See Appendix D: my address to the 10th BNCOD held in 1992].  I should perhaps mention here that in those BNCOD conferences I invited many American and European researchers as keynote speakers, and I am grateful that all of them came without asking me to pay for travelling expenses, which BNCOD did not have enough funds to pay.

 These conferences and my research activities had an impact on the SERC (now EPSRC) the British Government body for research funding. It invited me twice to address its committee. On both occasions I spent weeks preparing and polishing my 10-minute addresses on the state of, and the need for, database research in the UK, going over every word and every phrase again and again. It paid off, since I received not only sustained claps from the committee members, but also much private congratulations from my friends who were present. My speeches created a conducive atmosphere in favour of database research, which enabled me to argue successfully for research funds with the previously reluctant committee. This resulted in the formation of several database research groups in the UK, all funded by the SERC.  Because of these unparalleled activities to advance the cause of database research in the UK, I was at that time often called the father of British Database research. I have a feeling that the present generation of the UK DB researchers do not know any of this history.  However, as for my own career, I was invited to join the Imperial College and also received offers from two US Universities, but I decided to stay at Aberdeen  –  this was perhaps not my best non-move.

 Subsequent to these research support activities in the UK, I also help established database research groups at the Trinity College Dublin and Al-Quds University, Jerusalem (see under Miscellaneous Activities below).

 

4. My Personal Research Contribution to Databases

 I established a database research group in Aberdeen in 1977, and led the internationally known PRECI database research project, with funding from SERC (now called EPSRC) and EU. Two important contributions I have made to database research are:

   (i) The architecture developed in the PRECI project (1981-86) at Aberdeen still remains the most general architecture for distributed databases. This architecture had been in the syllabus of the database course at Stanford University (California), and was published in a book produced by the MIT [A. Gupta (Sloan School of Management)] as a major contribution in the late eighties.

   (ii) Semantic differences in heterogeneous distributed databases was first identified by me as a problem area in one of my papers in 1987, and it is now a major area of study under semantic interoperability all over the World.

 

Research Activities Cooperative Knowledge Based Systems

 As mentioned earlier, I established Data and Knowledge Engineering Research Group at Keele, which subsumed my research activities in Distributed Database Systems and in Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems (CKBS), the latter as an extension of distributed database technology in the field of agents, using, as mentioned before, the Engineering Paradigm (or database approach) as against the AI paradigm. This has applications in distributed information systems, internet-based supply-chain management, telecommunication network management, agent-based manufacturing systems, and P2P data/knowledge sharing systems.

 The DAKE research group at Keele became a centre of excellence in Europe, supported by the EU ESPRIT, EU/MODELAGE and EU/Agent-Link projects, the UK DTI and Industries. Toshiba of Japan used to make an annual contribution for advice and copies of technical reports (see Miscellaneous Activities below).

The large projects in which the DAKE group participated were the ESPRIT/IMAGINE project (1990 – 94) on CKBS (coordinated by Siemens) and the EU/HMS (Holonic Manufacturing Systems) project (1994 – 2001) on agent-based manufacturing for low-volume high variety production. The participants in the HMS project included the major manufacturers from the developed world, e.g. BHP from Australia, Toshiba, Hitachi and Fanuc from Japan, DaimlerChrysler from Europe, and Rockwell Automation from the USA. This was the largest international research project of 100 million dollars on agent-based manufacturing science.  The DAKE group developed the theoretical model for agent based manufacturing as envisioned in the HMS project.  My book (editor) "Agent-based Manufacturing – the Holonic Approach" [Springer] is an outcome of this project.

 I developed a model for agent based processing based on a reactive engineering paradigm, which is referred to as the DREAM (Dake Research into an Engineering Approach to Multi-agents) approach or the CKBS (Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems) approach. This model has provided the formal foundation for agent-based manufacturing in the HMS project (as stated above). Thus it became a major success story (2001). I have applied the DREAM ideas in supply-chain management databases over the Internet, in preference-based queries, in dynamic interoperability, and in scalability, robustness, flexibility and stability in supply-chain networks.  Later these ideas were used in P2P/DAKS (Peer-to-Peer Data and Knowledge Sharing) systems in a joint project with Prof M. Takizawa of Tokyo Denki University, Japan.

 

CKBS Conferences

I organised five conferences in the CKBS area, all at Keele, between 1989 and 1994, two national and three international, after which I decided to retire from conference organisations, having felt that I had done my share of such organisations. These conferences were:

 

(i)   International Conference on Data & Knowledge Integration, October 1989. I remember the German researchers wanted a TV to watch news on German integration following the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I finally found a TV for them.

(ii)    An International Conference On Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems, October, 1990. 

(iii)   British Workshop for the UK Academia and Industry on Agent-based Knowledge Integration, 1991.

(iv)  The UK/EU Conference on Multi-agent Systems Applications, 1992.

(v)  The Second International Conference on Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems, October 1994.

 

The international conferences were attended by delegates from the USA (e.g. Mike Huhns, Sham Navthe), Canada, Europe and Japan. The standard conference outings were visits to Chatsworth House and to a Shakespeare play at Stratford-on-Avon. In those days, the motorway traffic was not too bad and one could reach Stratford from Keele in one hour by specially hired coaches. After 1994, I still participated in conference organisations, but only jointly with Professor M. Takizawa and held outside the UK.

 

Miscellaneous Activities

 I present first a list of activities that I could not satisfactorily place under the categories described above, although a few of them have been referenced earlier. This list is followed by lists of various project partners, visitors to my research group and a partial list of my research students.

1. I designed and run two advanced Master degree courses, with EPSRC funding, one on Data Engineering, and the other on Machine Perception. The courses were popular and produced PhD candidates, but were withdrawn when EPSRC stopped funding all Advanced Master courses in the UK. 

2. I created a Distributed Database Working Group under the BCS (British Computer Society) in 1981.

3. I helped establish the database research group in the Trinity College, Dublin, and obtained EU funding for it. The College subsequently became a major research centre in this area.

4. With grants from the British Council, I brought a number of students from the Al-Quds University (Jerusalem) and trained them to MPhil and PhD degrees at Keele, as part of my Al-Quds project mentioned earlier.  I had to abandon similar plans for research training for several other countries due to the lack of sufficient commitments from the institutions at the other end.

5. As mentioned earlier, I advised the Chinese Universities as a World Bank Advisor in 1984.

6. I established a close cooperation with Professor Makoto Takizawa of Tokyo Denki (Technical) University. As a result, I had many collaborative programmes with him, some funded by the Royal Society and some continuing even after my retirement.

7. I was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Kobe in Japan and at the University of Coventry.

8. Visiting Professors to my research group were: Professor M. Takizawa of Tokyo Denki University and Professor Stephen Todd of IBM

9. The Visiting Fellows were: Dr C. J. Johnson of Plymouth University and Dr T. Kitamura of Japan

10. As mentioned earlier, I established a close cooperation with Toshiba of Japan, who contributed £3,000 every year to my research group and invited me to visit Toshiba in Japan many times. This cooperation was stopped with apologies from Toshiba when it suffered a severe financial downturn in the 2000’s. [Toshiba terminated many such overseas collaborations at that time.] I was also invited to visit many Japanese industries, including Fanuc, the World’s largest manufacturer of industrial robots, by its famous President Mr Inaba himself.

11. I was a member of the Editorial Board of:

    1. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Springer) and

    2. Data & Knowledge Engineering (North-Holland).

12. I was the Programme Committee member of many major international conferences (including VLDBs) – too many to list.

13. In the VLDB-1986 (Kyoto), I was the panel chairman to discuss the future of database research up to the year 2000.

14. In the VLDB-2000 (Cairo), I was again the panel chairman to discuss the new directions of database research in the new millennium.

 Observe that the VLDB is the most prestigious database research conference in the world, and to chair such important panels twice was a great honour for me.

 Finally Charities: As mentioned earlier, I have established two charities, one to assist the CS PhD students at Keele University from the developing countries and the other to assist my old village school in Bangladesh.

Project Partners

 

PRECI and related projects:

University of Stirling (and then Dundee Abertay),  Herriot-Watt University (Edinburgh),  Ulster University (Belfast), Leeds Polytechnic,  University of East Anglia, Trinity College Dublin,  University of Amsterdam,   INRIA, France,   University of Dortmund (later Berlin).

 

The EU IMAGINE project

It  had many industrial partners, with Siemens coordinating. The academic partners included the University of Amsterdam and Imperial College.

 

The MODELAGE and its follow-up AGENT-LINK projects

Both had had too many European University partners to list.

 

The HMS Project

The academic partners in the HMS project included Universities of Calgary and Vancouver in Canada, Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, the University of Hannover in Germany, and many Japanese Universities (including Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Keio).

 

Research Visitors

 Over the years many well-known scientists and researchers outside my funded projects have visited my research group. I mention here only some overseas visitors:

Charles Bachman (Minneapolis, the father of databases), G.M. Nijssen (Belgium), Vincent Lum (IBM Heidelberg), Peter Dadam (IBM, Heidelberg), Georges Gardarin (INRIA, France), W. Litwin (INRIA, France), Chris Date (IBM), Jim Gray (IBM, the later ACM Touring Award winner), Robin William (IBM, the then boss of Pat Selinger of IBM), Peter Buneman (Pennsylvania), H. Tirri (Helsinki), Wesley Chu (USA), Sharma Chakravarty (Florida), Sham Navathe (Georgia Tech, USA), M. Hatzopoulos (Athens), Jane Grimson (Trinity College, Dublin), Mike Huhns (Austin), Makoto Takizawa (Tokyo).

  

Research Students

I supervised many research students a partial list of whom is given here in order of their year of registration:  Ambrish Vashishta, Dirk Nikodem, David Bell, Dr George Ofori-Duampo, Rekha Amin, John Edgar, Donald Kennedy, Ray Carrick, Malcolm Taylor, Rubik Sadeghi, Andy Wakelin, Kashi Dandekar, Liang Gang, Rosanna Desankar, Athula Herath, Jonathan Knight, Mark Walsh, Najib Al-Sammaraie, Diana Kemnenovic, Farhad Haidari, Baird Ndvoie, Amanda Godfrey, Tony Oakden, Martyn Fletcher,  Yoshimi Inouchi, Peter Granby, James Cole, Muhammad Ewaida, Muhammad Hamad, Khalid Al-Hazmi, Muhammad Al-Qasim, Rashid Jayousi, Thomas Neligwa, Ryad Soobhany, Kapila Ponnamperuma.

 

Goto Page 4